So it has come to my attention that I need to work out whether Len is lesbian or transgender in order to pitch her story properly to a modern audience. I'd thought I could shrug it off, because Len has no concept of either, and the categorization of gender identity and sexual preference has only recently become precise enough to distinguish between the two - until gender reassignment surgery became possible, a transman might as well be a lesbian, for all practical purposes, and the idea of a male mind in a woman's body was seriously proposed as a "cause" for lesbianism even within the community. Radclyffe Hall takes it for granted in The Well of Loneliness, for example. (Not the only reason that book reads as strange and problematic today, by a long shot; but I think it reads a bit better if Stephen Gordon is interpreted as a transman, and his lover Angela, at least, as straight rather than bisexual. Mary could be either bi or straight. But anyway.)
Refusing to label real historical people by terms they wouldn't find applicable is all very well, but it leaves people with underrepresented identities feeling even more like beggars at the table than they are. St. Paul and H.P. Lovecraft both came as close to declaring themselves asexual as they could without having a word for it available to them, so it seems mean-spirited toward modern asexuals not to apply the label to them.
And in a modern book written for a modern audience, refusing to label is bad marketing as well as bad representation. Yes, there is a danger of agents and publishers and marketing people marginalizing a title with clear labels into literary ghettos - but there's no guarantee that won't happen, anyway, and at least a clear label, or even a ghetto, allows the audience to find the work, whether their circumstances empower them to pick it up, or not.
I started off thinking of Len as a lesbian by default. I'm bisexual, so it's fairly easy to imagine my way into a lesbian character; plus I'm so freaking cis I came up with the notion of gender as a social construct on my own when I was twelve. I feel so congruent with my body I have no intuitive grasp of the concept of feeling different or separate from it - if my body is female, I'm female, which makes feminine a wholly redundant term and the gendering of activities and self-presentation simply silly. A woman doing something is enough to render the activity feminine, and a man doing the same thing genders it as masculine, and in an ideal world nobody would be gender-policing anybody. And of course nobody would be transgender because everybody would be comfortable in their own skin and able to do what they wanted! Which probably meant they'd be bisexual, too, though the skinny parts of the bell curve would be occupied by strict monosexuals. In the meantime, of course, people who felt the need for extensive body modification surgery to bring their gender and sex into synch should not be prevented from getting it, or stigmatized for it, even though I personally found the whole concept icky. Surgery of any kind is a medical miracle that is indistinguishable from mutilation to me. Sometimes it's necessary, but the same is true of the death penalty and abortion, and those won't be necessary in a perfect world, either!
As I've become better informed about the subjective experiences of the genderqueer I've realized this was naive at best and insufferably smug at the worst. I may not have any better grasp of how it feels to be transgender than of how it tastes to enjoy an olive (which is one of the foulest things I've ever had in my mouth), but that's a limitation that doesn't prevent me from accepting the voice of experience when it tells me that for some people, sex and gender aren't the same and olives are delicious, and writing an olive-eating transmale character if I need to. And it began to seem to me that I had. (Not that there's any olives in the story, but Len has a close personal relationship with food like you wouldn't believe, and seems to enjoy everything. I had to cut out a lot of meal details during revision.) However, if Len is transgender, I'll need to do another big research stint and overhaul the manuscript, looking for places where my cis assumptions have trampled over Len's trans voice. I don't much want to do that - but I'd rather make that effort, than be guilty of misrepresenting the character.
So what makes me think Len might be a transman rather than a lesbian?
Well - the fact that once she puts on the Len persona she never, ever takes it off again, but spends the rest of her life presenting herself as male to the world. Even when sharing the secret with Di, she does not say: "I'm a woman" but "My name is Eleanor." When trying to convey, without breaching Victorian mores, that if she marries Di she will want a real marriage, not a sexless front, she says: "I would want to be your husband. And for you to be my wife."
The fact that to a certain degree she's not even donning a persona. She has always been "masculine" enough that her father had a Dad-joke about her and her sickly twin brother being switched at birth. She and her brother Leonard have always done the same things, a mix of masculine and feminine behaviors: "I could shoot as well as Len. He could sew as well as me." Even the name Len isn't appropriated from her brother, but shared with him - their family addresses them both as Len, because for most purposes one will do as well as another, and if you call for one you'll get them both. The feminine "Lennie" was used by outsiders to distinguish them, but not one instance of this has survived to the current draft.
The fact that, though she has several sad introspective moments in which she contemplates a lonely bachelor future, and regards getting into a satisfactory romantic relationship as equally impossible whether she lives as a man or a woman, she never considers returning home, where at least she would have her family. And she does love her family.
Moreover, the idea of a Boston marriage, which was common and perfectly respectable (because assumed to be sexless) never crosses her mind, and she doesn't discuss the possibility with Di. The original ending, since cut, explicitly shows Len living out the rest of her life as a man and never going home again.
That's all - pretty persuasive, actually.
Against this, we can place my consistent tendency to use female pronouns for her. (See preceding paragraphs!) This might, however, be my cissexism overriding my intention to accept Len as herself. Himself. Whatever.
If I'm that cissexist, though, is it even possible for me to accidentally create a transgender character, let alone one who feels as strongly individuated and fully-formed as Len has always been to me, from the first day I heard the voice in my head? Unconscious processes shouldn't be underestimated, but - if mine is capable of a trick like that, am I perhaps less cis than I've always felt? Suddenly I wander in fields of self-distrust.
Also, Len doesn't talk about body dismorphia at all. When she worries about being outed by an imperfection of the arrangements she's made in her clothing, by the tenor of her voice, by her smell, by her lack of snore, or whatever, she doesn't express any sense of the factors that might give her away being alien or wrong or not belonging to her in any way. When she looks in the mirror she expresses no sense of satisfaction at finally seeing the "right" self looking back at her, only examining herself critically for ways she can improve the illusion. She appears to accept the body she's in, and concern herself with presenting a male face to the world primarily because, having once begun, being discovered will cut her off from society - she will be a ruined woman, and fair game for anyone (any man, particularly) to treat any old way. She never comes out and says so, but if Cave discovered the secret while they were out tracking Pegasus, one consequence will almost certainly be rape, unless she's willing to shoot him. (And she would be able to. Even as a boy, Cave underestimates Len throughout; realizing she's a woman would remove all respect for her abilities as marksman.)
But would Len talk about body dismorphia, in terms I would understand and not edit away (unconscious cissexism at work again)? She is, after all, a respectable Victorian! The terms in which she can talk about bodies at all are limited. She never describes the specifics of the arrangements she makes to her wardrobe, or of what aspects of her natural body are more troublesome to hide than others. In Victorian society, changing the gender other people saw really was as simple as changing clothes and the part in your hair (men parted on the side; women, straight down the middle), because gender was signaled so clearly and unequivocally by clothes. People may or may not have talked about what was under the clothes, when they needed to; but only medical professionals and pornographers were not extremely cagey and indirect about what they wrote about bodies. And Len, though again this is in the cut-out ending, was writing to her and Di's adopted kids, to explain the shock they were going to get when they had to lay her out after she died.
So there I am, needing to revise my query (again) and completely bewildered. So I did what any modern woman would do, and went to the internet. My Google Fu failed me in looking for critique groups composed entirely of genderqueer people, alas. But Diversity Cross-check is a place where people from underrepresented demographics - people with disabilities, people who aren't Western white people, people who don't fall on the gender binary, people in marginalized subcultures, people who are more than one of these things - volunteer to give advice to people who want to write outside their own identities and don't want to be jackasses about it. So I went there and read far too many profiles of people who didn't sound like Len at all - but I did find one transman who used to think he was a lesbian, and as it happens he's a student of queer theory and has been very helpful. He cut right to the heart of the matter, and pointed out that what's going to govern modern perceptions of Len will be her motivation to live as a man. Possible reasons suggested were:
1. She wants to be with women, and in that case, she needs to be a man.
2. She dislikes the social restrictions on women, and prefers to be treated as a man because it jives with her personality better.
3. She doesn't consider herself a woman, and so the other option is being a man.
4. She thinks gender is dumb and wishes people would stop asking her; she lives as man because it's convenient/practical.
Other reasons could govern the change, but I don't really need them, as Len's motivations are straightforward. She initially cut her hair and donned her brother's clothes in order to run off with the neighbor girl. That's Reason #1. They couldn't do a Boston marriage because they had already caught them doing married-people things, so they'd have to go right away where no one knew them, and on the lawless Texas frontier, two women traveling alone were much less safe than a woman with a man. Two men would've been better, but Maudie was way too femme for it. When Maudie refused to go, Len was still in running away mode, much too angry to return home tamely (and see Maudie all the time), so she chose to stay away awhile and prove that she could make a living as a man, that her plan would have worked, if Maudie had been a little braver. That's Reason #2.
Most of the book is the time period during which she is proving this, partly to herself; and during this time she is falling in love with Di. Also, it's only a couple of months, and she explicitly thinks that, if Something Bad seems to be coming down the pike, San Antonio is further up the news chain than home, and not so far from it that she couldn't beat the Something Bad to them, and warn them. So she's committed to maintaining the male disguise until the political situation settles down, out of concern for her family.
By the time they emerge from the wilderness and blackmail Middleton into permitting them to marry, Len is committed to the gender presentation by her commitment to Di. Not only do they both have established identities in San Antonio (they could move, after all), but Di has a secret of her own, which scrutiny might reveal. And if they did go home and try a Boston marriage, in a place where Len's identity is well-known, Di would be scrutinized - by Len's own family. So retaining the male identity is about protecting Di - right back to Reason No. 1. Reasons 3 and 4 (and 5 and 6) aren't actively contraindicated - but they aren't actively invoked, either.
Besides, without the ending I cut out, the audience doesn't know that Len maintains the male disguise till the end of her life. The Len they will see is one who loves women, who wants to find, spend her life and have a family with, and protect one special woman, who imagines her desires in the context of the companionate marriage usual in her society; who is competent to do work normally reserved for men; for whom presenting herself as male is a means to an end.
So it looks as if I should pitch this as a lesbian novel, and treat Len as a lesbian, and be prepared to discuss the transgender issue if anybody else brings it up. Another comb-through of the text may not be a bad idea; but I'm not looking down the throat of a major revision.
And now I've worked all that out, maybe I can finally get back on revising down that query letter some more. Because it's still too long!
Much like this post.
Showing posts with label human behavior characters. Show all posts
Showing posts with label human behavior characters. Show all posts
Friday, April 17, 2015
Tuesday, February 17, 2015
The Absurd Leading the Sublime
So I've been reading something amazing on tumblr for awhile now, and it has reached a point at which I think it might be amazing even to people without the background to catch all the nuances, so I will speak of it.
Heimlichbourger's simblr is dedicated to detailing a "Test of Time Challenge," a style of play in which, by use of mods and rulesets, the player sets up a "prehistoric" neighborhood, with a limited range of items and interactions allowed, and attempts to build it organically into the typical roughly contemporary game setting by meeting specific criteria and playing through different eras with different mods and rulesets. It is, essentially, a way to play with the themes of games like the classic "Civilization" without losing the intense focus on individuals and domestic details on which Sims2 players thrive - a kind of soap opera worldbuilding. Far more people start than finish this difficult, long-term play challenge. Heimlichbourger added some refinements: three different geographical areas with three different types of sims - plantsims, ape sims, and werewolves - and three distinct social systems; and a ruleset that involves a bottom-up plan of development, so that instead of guiding sims through preconceived stages of civilization, the different cultures and histories develop according to the desires, behaviors, and characters of the sims responding to the challenges thrown at them by the game and the rules.
The result is epic, with myths generating themselves before the audience's eyes. If you only want to follow one simblr, follow this one, not mine - this is simultaneously something completely new in storytelling, and a harking back to the roots of all story.
Which sounds grandiose for something which, by its nature, will appeal most to a tightly niche audience. I believe that people who don't play this game will be able to appreciate what's happening here, because it is so good. But I know that only those who play the game themselves will appreciate it to its maximum potential, without being thrown off by things like sims in ape suits endlessly making potholders on a treadle sewing machine because that's the only way the game provides to simulate mastering the sewing skill enough to "unlock" tailored clothing. And quite a lot of people will be unable to get past such absurdities to appreciate it at all.
And this is fine. No one can like everything, and the fact that some people won't be able to make the mental accommodations necessary to enjoy something doesn't invalidate the quality of the work. My inability to fully appreciate (or even properly experience) classical music, or a basketball game, or grand master-level chess does not diminish the beauties of those things. The Grand Canyon will be an astounding sight, whether or not I ever go see it, or can bring myself to go down into it (balance issues would probably make the trip more terrifying than gratifying). Mathematical theorems that might as well be blank holes in the paper for all I am capable of comprehending them lose none of their beauty or elegance for my lack of comprehension. If a purpose for humanity exists, it must be to witness and give meaning to the world, yet a hummingbird migration is an event of wonder and joy, whether human eyes witness it or not.
Between human creativity and the natural productions of the universe, we live in a world comprised of more beauty, more cleverness, more sheer fun than any one of us can even hope to see, much less understand.
And that is a humbling, exhilarating, wonderful thing.
Heimlichbourger's simblr is dedicated to detailing a "Test of Time Challenge," a style of play in which, by use of mods and rulesets, the player sets up a "prehistoric" neighborhood, with a limited range of items and interactions allowed, and attempts to build it organically into the typical roughly contemporary game setting by meeting specific criteria and playing through different eras with different mods and rulesets. It is, essentially, a way to play with the themes of games like the classic "Civilization" without losing the intense focus on individuals and domestic details on which Sims2 players thrive - a kind of soap opera worldbuilding. Far more people start than finish this difficult, long-term play challenge. Heimlichbourger added some refinements: three different geographical areas with three different types of sims - plantsims, ape sims, and werewolves - and three distinct social systems; and a ruleset that involves a bottom-up plan of development, so that instead of guiding sims through preconceived stages of civilization, the different cultures and histories develop according to the desires, behaviors, and characters of the sims responding to the challenges thrown at them by the game and the rules.
The result is epic, with myths generating themselves before the audience's eyes. If you only want to follow one simblr, follow this one, not mine - this is simultaneously something completely new in storytelling, and a harking back to the roots of all story.
Which sounds grandiose for something which, by its nature, will appeal most to a tightly niche audience. I believe that people who don't play this game will be able to appreciate what's happening here, because it is so good. But I know that only those who play the game themselves will appreciate it to its maximum potential, without being thrown off by things like sims in ape suits endlessly making potholders on a treadle sewing machine because that's the only way the game provides to simulate mastering the sewing skill enough to "unlock" tailored clothing. And quite a lot of people will be unable to get past such absurdities to appreciate it at all.
And this is fine. No one can like everything, and the fact that some people won't be able to make the mental accommodations necessary to enjoy something doesn't invalidate the quality of the work. My inability to fully appreciate (or even properly experience) classical music, or a basketball game, or grand master-level chess does not diminish the beauties of those things. The Grand Canyon will be an astounding sight, whether or not I ever go see it, or can bring myself to go down into it (balance issues would probably make the trip more terrifying than gratifying). Mathematical theorems that might as well be blank holes in the paper for all I am capable of comprehending them lose none of their beauty or elegance for my lack of comprehension. If a purpose for humanity exists, it must be to witness and give meaning to the world, yet a hummingbird migration is an event of wonder and joy, whether human eyes witness it or not.
Between human creativity and the natural productions of the universe, we live in a world comprised of more beauty, more cleverness, more sheer fun than any one of us can even hope to see, much less understand.
And that is a humbling, exhilarating, wonderful thing.
Wednesday, January 14, 2015
Characters: Gaming, Fiction, Life
So there's this guy who used to game with us. He made himself persona non grata in our house and Damon and I don't play with him anymore, but he's still in a group with someone else we know. (And if you're reading this, A - your feelings are about to get hurt, but I'd advise you to pay attention, because sometimes the way to self-improvement is through hurt feelings. If you had ever shown any sign of actively listening to me I would've said all this to your face long ago.)
He gamed with us for a long time, and for most of that time we didn't understand why he was showing up. And though he has not done any of the specific things there that have made him unwelcome in my home, we are still regaled occasionally with tales of what A did, in the other gaming group, to demonstrate that he hasn't changed. He brings an electronic device and does things on it rather than paying attention to the game. He comes late. He deliberately builds suboptimal characters that don't accomplish things in the game.
I have often thought, and several times remarked, that if you gave A a high-level, fully-optimized character and ran him alongside, or in direct conflict with, a low-level, poorly-optimized character played by Damon, Damon's character would still be the effective one. Because Damon would (grumbling all the way at the unfairness of it all) milk every advantage he could out of the character he had, that character's surroundings, the game mechanics, and the dice. A wouldn't even use the advantages that were spelled out for him on his character sheet.
I wish to be clear about something: I build suboptimal gaming characters all the time. I get my stats (in systems derived from D&D, four-d6-drop-the-lowest-and-arrange-as-desired is the one true character generation method; all others are cheats and imitations), I get the specifics of the campaign setting, a backstory sparks, I create a character, and then I do all the fiddly skill-building, power-assigning, equipment-buying stuff - in character. When we play Pathfinder, a D&D derivative whose creators believe heavily in "the build" as the be-all and end-all of character creation and combat as the main focus of the game, I sometimes feel crushed under the weight of the decisions that have to be made, and if I don't get Damon (who is great at manipulating systems) to help me I generally have a character who would die if not surrounded by combat monsters and healers. Even in a rules-light game like the current Deadlands campaign I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, I often find myself looking around for something Miss Cranthorp can do while the other characters are fighting. Put Miss Cranthorp into melee and she's at a loss.
But - and this is why people respond to Miss Cranthorp as an awesome character and to A's characters as bad jokes - if Miss Cranthorp can't fight she will volunteer to drive the train to free up the current driver for combat (and accidentally shake a bunch of mooks off the top of the passenger car before they can enter melee, suddenly putting the odds in our favor). A's characters, in a similar situation, will hide, or spend several rounds building up personal defenses while other party members are getting clobbered within arm's reach, or run away, or do nothing at all because A is watching cat videos or something on his laptop and the GM gets tired of trying to get his attention.
My characters are individuals who engage with other individuals in the game, with the setting, with the particular problem in hand. I inhabit them fully while I play them, and even if they die (which they tend not to, even in Pathfinder), people remember them fondly, and not as suboptimal at all. Being remembered well is a more important part of "winning" in RPGs - and in fiction - than is triumphing. Many a great gaming story ends in a Total Party Kill. Nor are Romeo and Juliet memorable for their ability to solve the conflicts presented to them by the plot!
A doesn't appear to inhabit his own character fully, much less the fictional ones under his control. He doesn't engage with the people around him enough to understand or even respect their points of view (which is how he got kicked out of my house). He doesn't understand the rules - of the game, of the story, of the society he lives in - well enough to use them, abuse them, or even effectually break them. He won't even engage his own problems, preferring to continue behaving in the same way endlessly amid people who don't know why he showed up and inevitably grow contemptuous of him.
Which is why I'm bringing him up. A no doubt has reasons for the behaviors he slouches along in. One reason we dealt with him as long as we did was that we assumed he had a lot of crap he was dealing with and that, as fellow borderline social-rejects, we were doing him some sort of good even though we couldn't see it, by providing a safe place to work through - whatever he was working through. But it's been more than 15 years and, if our friend in his current gaming group is to be believed (I have no reason to doubt him), he's still passively, stubbornly, even a little self-righteously, not doing the same old things he always never did. No meds, no therapy, no experimentation. No engagement.
An awful lot of life is just a matter of showing up and paying attention.
Maybe you don't understand the rules. You don't have to understand them to engage with them. To challenge them. To find your way through them. To bend them to your will.
But you require a will, first.
You have to have a character before you can create a character.
Are your characters flat and lifeless on the page? Are they boring? Are they whiny? Are they collections of quirks and flaws and virtues moving through the plot rather than people moving the plot around? Do they all sound like each other?
What about you? Are you showing up for your own life?
If you're not - it doesn't matter why you're not. Maybe your reason's good, maybe it's crappy; either way, it's preventing you from doing something you say you want to do, i.e. write well.
So what are you going to do about it?
He gamed with us for a long time, and for most of that time we didn't understand why he was showing up. And though he has not done any of the specific things there that have made him unwelcome in my home, we are still regaled occasionally with tales of what A did, in the other gaming group, to demonstrate that he hasn't changed. He brings an electronic device and does things on it rather than paying attention to the game. He comes late. He deliberately builds suboptimal characters that don't accomplish things in the game.
I have often thought, and several times remarked, that if you gave A a high-level, fully-optimized character and ran him alongside, or in direct conflict with, a low-level, poorly-optimized character played by Damon, Damon's character would still be the effective one. Because Damon would (grumbling all the way at the unfairness of it all) milk every advantage he could out of the character he had, that character's surroundings, the game mechanics, and the dice. A wouldn't even use the advantages that were spelled out for him on his character sheet.
I wish to be clear about something: I build suboptimal gaming characters all the time. I get my stats (in systems derived from D&D, four-d6-drop-the-lowest-and-arrange-as-desired is the one true character generation method; all others are cheats and imitations), I get the specifics of the campaign setting, a backstory sparks, I create a character, and then I do all the fiddly skill-building, power-assigning, equipment-buying stuff - in character. When we play Pathfinder, a D&D derivative whose creators believe heavily in "the build" as the be-all and end-all of character creation and combat as the main focus of the game, I sometimes feel crushed under the weight of the decisions that have to be made, and if I don't get Damon (who is great at manipulating systems) to help me I generally have a character who would die if not surrounded by combat monsters and healers. Even in a rules-light game like the current Deadlands campaign I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, I often find myself looking around for something Miss Cranthorp can do while the other characters are fighting. Put Miss Cranthorp into melee and she's at a loss.
But - and this is why people respond to Miss Cranthorp as an awesome character and to A's characters as bad jokes - if Miss Cranthorp can't fight she will volunteer to drive the train to free up the current driver for combat (and accidentally shake a bunch of mooks off the top of the passenger car before they can enter melee, suddenly putting the odds in our favor). A's characters, in a similar situation, will hide, or spend several rounds building up personal defenses while other party members are getting clobbered within arm's reach, or run away, or do nothing at all because A is watching cat videos or something on his laptop and the GM gets tired of trying to get his attention.
My characters are individuals who engage with other individuals in the game, with the setting, with the particular problem in hand. I inhabit them fully while I play them, and even if they die (which they tend not to, even in Pathfinder), people remember them fondly, and not as suboptimal at all. Being remembered well is a more important part of "winning" in RPGs - and in fiction - than is triumphing. Many a great gaming story ends in a Total Party Kill. Nor are Romeo and Juliet memorable for their ability to solve the conflicts presented to them by the plot!
A doesn't appear to inhabit his own character fully, much less the fictional ones under his control. He doesn't engage with the people around him enough to understand or even respect their points of view (which is how he got kicked out of my house). He doesn't understand the rules - of the game, of the story, of the society he lives in - well enough to use them, abuse them, or even effectually break them. He won't even engage his own problems, preferring to continue behaving in the same way endlessly amid people who don't know why he showed up and inevitably grow contemptuous of him.
Which is why I'm bringing him up. A no doubt has reasons for the behaviors he slouches along in. One reason we dealt with him as long as we did was that we assumed he had a lot of crap he was dealing with and that, as fellow borderline social-rejects, we were doing him some sort of good even though we couldn't see it, by providing a safe place to work through - whatever he was working through. But it's been more than 15 years and, if our friend in his current gaming group is to be believed (I have no reason to doubt him), he's still passively, stubbornly, even a little self-righteously, not doing the same old things he always never did. No meds, no therapy, no experimentation. No engagement.
An awful lot of life is just a matter of showing up and paying attention.
Maybe you don't understand the rules. You don't have to understand them to engage with them. To challenge them. To find your way through them. To bend them to your will.
But you require a will, first.
You have to have a character before you can create a character.
Are your characters flat and lifeless on the page? Are they boring? Are they whiny? Are they collections of quirks and flaws and virtues moving through the plot rather than people moving the plot around? Do they all sound like each other?
What about you? Are you showing up for your own life?
If you're not - it doesn't matter why you're not. Maybe your reason's good, maybe it's crappy; either way, it's preventing you from doing something you say you want to do, i.e. write well.
So what are you going to do about it?
Thursday, November 13, 2014
The Optimist at the Gaming Table of Life
So the gaming group tried something different last Sunday: Deadlands, with the Savage Worlds system, with a GM who doesn't play with us very often, who is less mechanic-focused than about half our regular group. It was October 1879 in an American West overrun with magic and monsters, and the party we assembled to go looking for a missing railroad crew in Donner Pass consisted of war-weary Confederate veteran Captain William Palmer, bounty hunter Mina Winchester, frontiersman "Texas Jake" Johnson, Father Patrick O'Flannery (who one of us - not me, surprisingly - said should be named Connor), and - schoolmarm Miss Agnes Cranthorp.
I kept thinking, as I put Miss Cranthorp together, that she was going to die horribly, or at least be a drag on the party. All her attribute points went into Smarts, Spirit, and Vigor; her skills were things like Intimidate, Guts, Knowledge, and Persuasion; she was near-sighted, loyal, strong-willed, and charismatic - and she couldn't hit the broad side of a barn with any of the weapons the others were carrying. Even Father O'Flannery had a sidearm and a hunting rifle. Miss Cranthorp had a carpetbag full of books, a good black silk dress, and school supplies, and we were all joking about how her favored weapon was a ruler. But from the moment I heard "Weird West" I knew my character was a schoolmarm. I'm used to playing the character who's the Least Valuable Player in terms of damage dealt, whose main function is to keep other characters alive or to distract the GM while the strategists and game mechanics experts devise plans. I play to be somebody besides myself for a few hours, not to indulge power fantasies. So I put together Miss Cranthorp (you're not engaged or related, you don't get to even think of her as Agnes!) with the mental reservation that she'd probably be dead at the end of the day.
Instead, the DM was making jokes about everybody else hiding behind the schoolmarm and Texas Jake was promising to buy her a yardstick when we got back to civilization. For one thing, I was rolling pretty hot - our opponents, a wendigo and the victims of its curse of insatiable hunger (yes, I know wendigo is an Algonquian monster, not something you'd normally find in the Rockies, but I guess for purposes of the module they'd spread across the continent or something) - could not touch Miss Cranthrop, and she was nailing almost everything she tried. She shook off the curse, she dodged wolves and bullets and claws, she was unshaken by cannibalized corpses or being surrounded by hunger-crazed railroad workers or even the wendigo himself and the zombies he raised to oppose us.
Her shining moment, however, came when we were surrounded by the hunger-crazed railroad workers. Two had shotguns, four had clubs, and they were all clearly intent on eating us. Miss Cranthorp had borrowed a shotgun, but she had never used one before and had probably never struck a blow in anger in her life. Also, both Texas Jake and Captain Palmer were also affected by the curse, though they had so far fought off the urge to kill and eat the rest of us. Our working theory was that consuming human flesh would change a cursed person in a fundamental way, and we had ample reason to believe that our opponents had crossed that line. So when she happened to be the first to be able to act in the round, I as player knew that she probably needed to just pull the trigger, that we would be forced to kill them all. But I as Miss Cranthorp knew that she had to try to talk them down, that if she survived she would not be able to live with herself if she didn't. So I took an Intimidate, describing her as pointing the shotgun in her best imitation of Miss Winchester, drawing herself up as straight as she could, and using the Teacher Voice to address one of the men with shotguns, telling him that we would find the source of the curse and break it, freeing them all from this awful hunger, but right now he needed to put the gun down. And once again, she nailed it - not enough to make him actually put the gun down, not then, but enough that the GM decided he lowered it, looked confused, and held back from acting.
This successful Intimidation changed the whole tenor of the encounter. If the cursed could respond to the Teacher Voice they were still human and probably not responsible for their actions; so everyone in the party immediately switched modes. Captain Palmer, who had been about to aim for the head of the other shotgun-weilder, went for a disarm instead; Father O'Flannery helped Miss Cranthorp take the gun away from the one she'd intimidated; Texas Jake and Miss Winchester used their weapons as clubs; and we soon had them all tied up and stowed, in varying states of consciousness, in a ruined cabin with furs tucked around them so they wouldn't freeze while we tracked down the source of the curse. Instead of killing them, we freed them; and since we had explicitly come to Donner Pass to find out what had become of them and help them if we could, this was by far the most satisfactory outcome and a big win for humanity.
This sort of thing happens all the time in games. It happens in stories, too, but in that case the dice are all loaded - the author has a desired outcome and that outcome will happen. The reader may shove that knowledge down deep into her head where it can't interfere with her enjoyment, but she does know that. In games, though, you've got honest die rolls, implacable mechanics, and a player who is or is not determined to play the character to the hilt and not give in till the last roll of the dice.
And here's the thing - I am the only optimist in my gaming group. I have a biological tendency toward depression, and being an optimist has sometimes been the only way I could get out of bed in the morning. Everyone else at the table is saying "TPK time" and "OK, I may as well start rolling up my next character," or acting on the worst-case scenario assumption, and my not-exactly-optimized character is saying: "Okay, I do this then. No? I try this then. No? Oh, hush, we can still pull this out. I try this then. Yes! Okay, that's a start, now I'm gonna do this."
I am not a better player than the others, not by a long shot. We have players who can make a system dance; who can finesse a build or pull a huge advantage out of an innocuous mechanic or solve an intricate puzzle in ways I can't even follow, much less do myself. My strength is in playing my character flat out, to the hilt, and to the bitter end. That's why, when five out of six party members were captured by cannibals, my rogue got away and returned alone to free them from the larder. That's why this Deadlands party is not made up of murderers. That's also why I also occasionally get into situations in which my characters get into head-to-head confrontations with other characters, over how to treat prisoners or who's in charge (not something I normally fret about, but that was explicitly Sofia's mission, dammit, and not only did he flout her authority he damn near got everybody killed doing it) or how to handle some delicate situation; but that's the breaks. It makes for an interesting game, anyhow.
And it's because this works in games that, when push comes to shove, I never can quite give up on something there is any chance of doing, or that nobody else can do for me. And why I get so frustrated with people who quit before they begin; who assume failure as the default state, or that because they failed once that's the end of it.
It's not over till it's over. Stay on the ride. At least find out where it's going.
Do you want The Thing, or not?
I kept thinking, as I put Miss Cranthorp together, that she was going to die horribly, or at least be a drag on the party. All her attribute points went into Smarts, Spirit, and Vigor; her skills were things like Intimidate, Guts, Knowledge, and Persuasion; she was near-sighted, loyal, strong-willed, and charismatic - and she couldn't hit the broad side of a barn with any of the weapons the others were carrying. Even Father O'Flannery had a sidearm and a hunting rifle. Miss Cranthorp had a carpetbag full of books, a good black silk dress, and school supplies, and we were all joking about how her favored weapon was a ruler. But from the moment I heard "Weird West" I knew my character was a schoolmarm. I'm used to playing the character who's the Least Valuable Player in terms of damage dealt, whose main function is to keep other characters alive or to distract the GM while the strategists and game mechanics experts devise plans. I play to be somebody besides myself for a few hours, not to indulge power fantasies. So I put together Miss Cranthorp (you're not engaged or related, you don't get to even think of her as Agnes!) with the mental reservation that she'd probably be dead at the end of the day.
Instead, the DM was making jokes about everybody else hiding behind the schoolmarm and Texas Jake was promising to buy her a yardstick when we got back to civilization. For one thing, I was rolling pretty hot - our opponents, a wendigo and the victims of its curse of insatiable hunger (yes, I know wendigo is an Algonquian monster, not something you'd normally find in the Rockies, but I guess for purposes of the module they'd spread across the continent or something) - could not touch Miss Cranthrop, and she was nailing almost everything she tried. She shook off the curse, she dodged wolves and bullets and claws, she was unshaken by cannibalized corpses or being surrounded by hunger-crazed railroad workers or even the wendigo himself and the zombies he raised to oppose us.
Her shining moment, however, came when we were surrounded by the hunger-crazed railroad workers. Two had shotguns, four had clubs, and they were all clearly intent on eating us. Miss Cranthorp had borrowed a shotgun, but she had never used one before and had probably never struck a blow in anger in her life. Also, both Texas Jake and Captain Palmer were also affected by the curse, though they had so far fought off the urge to kill and eat the rest of us. Our working theory was that consuming human flesh would change a cursed person in a fundamental way, and we had ample reason to believe that our opponents had crossed that line. So when she happened to be the first to be able to act in the round, I as player knew that she probably needed to just pull the trigger, that we would be forced to kill them all. But I as Miss Cranthorp knew that she had to try to talk them down, that if she survived she would not be able to live with herself if she didn't. So I took an Intimidate, describing her as pointing the shotgun in her best imitation of Miss Winchester, drawing herself up as straight as she could, and using the Teacher Voice to address one of the men with shotguns, telling him that we would find the source of the curse and break it, freeing them all from this awful hunger, but right now he needed to put the gun down. And once again, she nailed it - not enough to make him actually put the gun down, not then, but enough that the GM decided he lowered it, looked confused, and held back from acting.
This successful Intimidation changed the whole tenor of the encounter. If the cursed could respond to the Teacher Voice they were still human and probably not responsible for their actions; so everyone in the party immediately switched modes. Captain Palmer, who had been about to aim for the head of the other shotgun-weilder, went for a disarm instead; Father O'Flannery helped Miss Cranthorp take the gun away from the one she'd intimidated; Texas Jake and Miss Winchester used their weapons as clubs; and we soon had them all tied up and stowed, in varying states of consciousness, in a ruined cabin with furs tucked around them so they wouldn't freeze while we tracked down the source of the curse. Instead of killing them, we freed them; and since we had explicitly come to Donner Pass to find out what had become of them and help them if we could, this was by far the most satisfactory outcome and a big win for humanity.
This sort of thing happens all the time in games. It happens in stories, too, but in that case the dice are all loaded - the author has a desired outcome and that outcome will happen. The reader may shove that knowledge down deep into her head where it can't interfere with her enjoyment, but she does know that. In games, though, you've got honest die rolls, implacable mechanics, and a player who is or is not determined to play the character to the hilt and not give in till the last roll of the dice.
And here's the thing - I am the only optimist in my gaming group. I have a biological tendency toward depression, and being an optimist has sometimes been the only way I could get out of bed in the morning. Everyone else at the table is saying "TPK time" and "OK, I may as well start rolling up my next character," or acting on the worst-case scenario assumption, and my not-exactly-optimized character is saying: "Okay, I do this then. No? I try this then. No? Oh, hush, we can still pull this out. I try this then. Yes! Okay, that's a start, now I'm gonna do this."
I am not a better player than the others, not by a long shot. We have players who can make a system dance; who can finesse a build or pull a huge advantage out of an innocuous mechanic or solve an intricate puzzle in ways I can't even follow, much less do myself. My strength is in playing my character flat out, to the hilt, and to the bitter end. That's why, when five out of six party members were captured by cannibals, my rogue got away and returned alone to free them from the larder. That's why this Deadlands party is not made up of murderers. That's also why I also occasionally get into situations in which my characters get into head-to-head confrontations with other characters, over how to treat prisoners or who's in charge (not something I normally fret about, but that was explicitly Sofia's mission, dammit, and not only did he flout her authority he damn near got everybody killed doing it) or how to handle some delicate situation; but that's the breaks. It makes for an interesting game, anyhow.
And it's because this works in games that, when push comes to shove, I never can quite give up on something there is any chance of doing, or that nobody else can do for me. And why I get so frustrated with people who quit before they begin; who assume failure as the default state, or that because they failed once that's the end of it.
It's not over till it's over. Stay on the ride. At least find out where it's going.
Do you want The Thing, or not?
Thursday, July 24, 2014
Wanders in, Muttering...
Okay, that wasn't the plan at all. I don't often miss a Garage Sale. Suffice to say I overdid things badly on Saturday and took a long time recovering. Between that and the cat knocking the water glass over on the keyboard, it has not been a productive week.
On the other hand, I think I know how to make Novel-Penny alien after all! It involves the aliens being as screwed up as humans, which strikes me as realistic (given certain premises). Which is good, because the more I write Penny's dialog, the more "right" it sounds and the more strongly I realize that she's not anywhere on the autistic spectrum or any other human neuroatypical place. She's an alien.
Novel-Skye, however, may well be autistic, so I haven't let myself off the research hook by any means. Fortunately I do have a couple of Aspie net acquaintances who can probably point me in the right direction once I'm ready to knuckle down to it. Which may be awhile, because I still don't know what Pelin's doing between breakfast and moonrise on the day his disenchantment's due. Except he still has to take that list of locations to the scryers, and Loris is going to see Pommy herself...(wanders off muttering).
On the other hand, I think I know how to make Novel-Penny alien after all! It involves the aliens being as screwed up as humans, which strikes me as realistic (given certain premises). Which is good, because the more I write Penny's dialog, the more "right" it sounds and the more strongly I realize that she's not anywhere on the autistic spectrum or any other human neuroatypical place. She's an alien.
Novel-Skye, however, may well be autistic, so I haven't let myself off the research hook by any means. Fortunately I do have a couple of Aspie net acquaintances who can probably point me in the right direction once I'm ready to knuckle down to it. Which may be awhile, because I still don't know what Pelin's doing between breakfast and moonrise on the day his disenchantment's due. Except he still has to take that list of locations to the scryers, and Loris is going to see Pommy herself...(wanders off muttering).
Sunday, February 23, 2014
Idea Garage Sale: Genderswapping the Oldies
We're all genre-savvy and sophisticated these days. We know the rules, we understand the games, there is nothing new under the sun. We can let ourselves get bored, or we can play with it. Our choice.
I've seen a post going the rounds on tumblr (unfortunately I can't trace it back to the original publication, because it's not cited on the tumblr post everybody's reblogging - get your act together, y'all!) about what happens when a script is performed with all the actors reading women's roles and all the actress's reading men's roles. (The guys start whining about how much their parts suck, that's what.)
I look at this and I see several creative opportunities. One, of course, is to stage or rewrite some classic work, genderswapped. Otherwise, play it straight. How is Pride and Prejudice different if Elizabeth Bennet is rich and proud, Fitzwilliam Darcy poor and prejudiced; or if Georgette Wickham is a woman with a past and Charlie Bennet and George Darcy are naive boys? How do we feel about Edwina Rochester keeping her mad husband in the attic and John Eyre returning to her after she's lied to him and very nearly entangled him in a crime? What sort of an America produces a male Scarlett O'Hara and a female Rhett Butler? If the protagonist and title character in The Devil Wears Prada are male, how do we react to them?
Another possibility is to be meta about it, and write a story about the process of pulling the genderflip. It is not unusual for acting groups, from high school drama to community theater, to have more female than male participants; so isn't this a logical way to address a shortage? What if a high school puts on a genderswapped production of Macbeth, for example? The guys would have nothing to whine about, because the scant female roles in that are doozies; but they also put the whole question of gender power and politics on the line. I have faith that high school girls who can pull off Macbeth, MacDuff, Malcolm, and Banquo can be found in most drama departments; but the high school guys who can play Lady Macbeth and the witches? Who can get their macho attitudes and privileged assumptions under control enough? What if the drama department's Stereotypically Required Gay Guy gets the part - can he resist the urge to camp it up? What does the principal say? How about the parents and the booster clubs? What if the reason the school play can't get guys is that the football coach won a turf war in a small school with limited resources? What if the Drama Club is one bad night away from being cut altogether?
That'd be interesting. I'd read that.
I've seen a post going the rounds on tumblr (unfortunately I can't trace it back to the original publication, because it's not cited on the tumblr post everybody's reblogging - get your act together, y'all!) about what happens when a script is performed with all the actors reading women's roles and all the actress's reading men's roles. (The guys start whining about how much their parts suck, that's what.)
I look at this and I see several creative opportunities. One, of course, is to stage or rewrite some classic work, genderswapped. Otherwise, play it straight. How is Pride and Prejudice different if Elizabeth Bennet is rich and proud, Fitzwilliam Darcy poor and prejudiced; or if Georgette Wickham is a woman with a past and Charlie Bennet and George Darcy are naive boys? How do we feel about Edwina Rochester keeping her mad husband in the attic and John Eyre returning to her after she's lied to him and very nearly entangled him in a crime? What sort of an America produces a male Scarlett O'Hara and a female Rhett Butler? If the protagonist and title character in The Devil Wears Prada are male, how do we react to them?
Another possibility is to be meta about it, and write a story about the process of pulling the genderflip. It is not unusual for acting groups, from high school drama to community theater, to have more female than male participants; so isn't this a logical way to address a shortage? What if a high school puts on a genderswapped production of Macbeth, for example? The guys would have nothing to whine about, because the scant female roles in that are doozies; but they also put the whole question of gender power and politics on the line. I have faith that high school girls who can pull off Macbeth, MacDuff, Malcolm, and Banquo can be found in most drama departments; but the high school guys who can play Lady Macbeth and the witches? Who can get their macho attitudes and privileged assumptions under control enough? What if the drama department's Stereotypically Required Gay Guy gets the part - can he resist the urge to camp it up? What does the principal say? How about the parents and the booster clubs? What if the reason the school play can't get guys is that the football coach won a turf war in a small school with limited resources? What if the Drama Club is one bad night away from being cut altogether?
That'd be interesting. I'd read that.
Tuesday, December 24, 2013
A Holiday Exercise
To help you get through those long and difficult holiday occasions when you need to be in the same room as someone who annoys the life out of you, try activating your writing backbrain to figure out how you'd go about putting him/her/it into a story and making him/her/it a sympathetic character.
Bear in mind that a character may be sympathetic without being at all likable. Scrooge (I finished my annual Christmas Carol reread yesterday) is not a likable character in any significant sense; but he's sympathetic, all the same.
Maybe that person will be more bearable afterward. Or maybe not. But at least you'll have gotten some good out of him/her/it.
Just make sure, if you ever use such a person in published works, that he/she/it is rendered completely unrecognizable.
Bear in mind that a character may be sympathetic without being at all likable. Scrooge (I finished my annual Christmas Carol reread yesterday) is not a likable character in any significant sense; but he's sympathetic, all the same.
Maybe that person will be more bearable afterward. Or maybe not. But at least you'll have gotten some good out of him/her/it.
Just make sure, if you ever use such a person in published works, that he/she/it is rendered completely unrecognizable.
Thursday, October 3, 2013
The Black Hole in the Center
Why hadn't they taken her, too? What was the point of making her, if they didn't want to see her, too? You didn't do an experiment, and then go off and never look at the result!
That's the crux of the alien/faery child trope. The interest of the story lies in the alien child's interaction with the familiar environment, which is the story of all our alienated selves; but the key to satisfactory resolution lies in the question, Why is the child not in her native environment?
Answer that well, and all other difficulties in telling the story become trivial and soluble. Don't answer that well, and no virtue the story has can overcome the gravitational pull of the black hole in the center.
It is possible the reader and characters won't know at the end of the story. But it is essential that the author do so.
I recommend that you not commit to the story till you know that. But you'll do what you have to do.
That's the crux of the alien/faery child trope. The interest of the story lies in the alien child's interaction with the familiar environment, which is the story of all our alienated selves; but the key to satisfactory resolution lies in the question, Why is the child not in her native environment?
Answer that well, and all other difficulties in telling the story become trivial and soluble. Don't answer that well, and no virtue the story has can overcome the gravitational pull of the black hole in the center.
It is possible the reader and characters won't know at the end of the story. But it is essential that the author do so.
I recommend that you not commit to the story till you know that. But you'll do what you have to do.
Sunday, March 17, 2013
Idea Garage Sale: Who Are You?
What's the worst thing that ever happened to you?
Who were you before that?
Who are you now?
How did that transformation happen?
You don't have to tell me (I'm certainly not going to tell you mine!), but you should tell yourself. Because that's your character arc. If you don't understand your own, how can you be sure you understand those of your characters? And you're already using it anyway, just as you use everything in your life when writing because your life is the handiest mine of material.
I don't know why the elements of a story are called arcs. I should try to find out. When I use the term in presentations I spontaneously delineate a curved line in the air with my finger, and I tend to think of them as structural arches holding the story up, but I don't know how the term originates.
Character arcs aren't absolutely necessary for telling a good story, but most modern fiction includes them, or pretends to, as a matter of course. It's one of the artistic problems that serial fiction has - writers and audiences feel incomplete if there's no character arc, so the writers of superhero comics, sitcoms, cartoons, and soap operas write stories involving them - but the series bible doesn't change, so the next episode puts the character right back where he was before the life-changing events of the story. Wise artists in serial formats accept this and use it to reinforce the character - Charlie Brown has learned the hard way not to trust Lucy, but he can never resist making another try for that football, and each annual football event through the run of Peanuts revolved around his increasingly elaborate mental gymnastics in overcoming the lessons learned in past football seasons. If he ever held true to his intention of not kicking the football this time, he'd grow up too much to be Charlie Brown any more.
So you need to make your peace with character arcs - you'll be writing them, or writing around them, for your entire career. And the fact is, you're probably going to be writing around your own for the duration, too.
By tradition, the first novel is expected to be autobiographical, and a lot of writers never get past it. They have one story to tell and then they stop; or they think of new ways to tell the same story, in different kinds of fancy dress. Which may be artistically sterile, or may drive an increasing richness and subtlety of imagination. That's up to you.
You have more than one character arc in your life, though. The worst thing that ever happens to you may not have happened yet, and isn't that a cheery thought? But in addition to that - your character arcs intersect with those of everyone around you. One reason I'm not telling you mine is that it's inextricably bound up with that of my husband and I'm not discussing the details of my marriage with the entire internet. So when you examine your own character arc, ask yourself about those of the other people in your life. Odds are good that the time you got hit by a car was the start of the driver's character arc, too; your divorce had a profound effect on the life trajectories of your children; the bully you learned to walk away from needs a character arc if she's not to be stuck in bully mode for the rest of her life. And those character arcs are a part of you, too.
Where does that take you?
And if you're thinking that all this is too much, your character arc hurts too much for artistic treatment, go read some Nancy Werlin. I don't care what your character arc is, it does not hurt more than hers, and she's been dealing with that for several books now.
Who were you before that?
Who are you now?
How did that transformation happen?
You don't have to tell me (I'm certainly not going to tell you mine!), but you should tell yourself. Because that's your character arc. If you don't understand your own, how can you be sure you understand those of your characters? And you're already using it anyway, just as you use everything in your life when writing because your life is the handiest mine of material.
I don't know why the elements of a story are called arcs. I should try to find out. When I use the term in presentations I spontaneously delineate a curved line in the air with my finger, and I tend to think of them as structural arches holding the story up, but I don't know how the term originates.
Character arcs aren't absolutely necessary for telling a good story, but most modern fiction includes them, or pretends to, as a matter of course. It's one of the artistic problems that serial fiction has - writers and audiences feel incomplete if there's no character arc, so the writers of superhero comics, sitcoms, cartoons, and soap operas write stories involving them - but the series bible doesn't change, so the next episode puts the character right back where he was before the life-changing events of the story. Wise artists in serial formats accept this and use it to reinforce the character - Charlie Brown has learned the hard way not to trust Lucy, but he can never resist making another try for that football, and each annual football event through the run of Peanuts revolved around his increasingly elaborate mental gymnastics in overcoming the lessons learned in past football seasons. If he ever held true to his intention of not kicking the football this time, he'd grow up too much to be Charlie Brown any more.
So you need to make your peace with character arcs - you'll be writing them, or writing around them, for your entire career. And the fact is, you're probably going to be writing around your own for the duration, too.
By tradition, the first novel is expected to be autobiographical, and a lot of writers never get past it. They have one story to tell and then they stop; or they think of new ways to tell the same story, in different kinds of fancy dress. Which may be artistically sterile, or may drive an increasing richness and subtlety of imagination. That's up to you.
You have more than one character arc in your life, though. The worst thing that ever happens to you may not have happened yet, and isn't that a cheery thought? But in addition to that - your character arcs intersect with those of everyone around you. One reason I'm not telling you mine is that it's inextricably bound up with that of my husband and I'm not discussing the details of my marriage with the entire internet. So when you examine your own character arc, ask yourself about those of the other people in your life. Odds are good that the time you got hit by a car was the start of the driver's character arc, too; your divorce had a profound effect on the life trajectories of your children; the bully you learned to walk away from needs a character arc if she's not to be stuck in bully mode for the rest of her life. And those character arcs are a part of you, too.
Where does that take you?
And if you're thinking that all this is too much, your character arc hurts too much for artistic treatment, go read some Nancy Werlin. I don't care what your character arc is, it does not hurt more than hers, and she's been dealing with that for several books now.
Thursday, June 14, 2012
Why I Game
Yeah, there's a gaming story coming up, but it has a point, I promise.
I play my Sims2 neighborhood, Drama Acres, in one day rotations, meaning that I will play one household, containing one to eight little pixel dolls, for one in-game day, and then move on to the next, in a customary order. This is not a particularly long time to spend with one family, but it allows me to play a fine-grained game, with events in one household - say, a death, marriage, date, or quarrel - having repercussions in other households throughout the neighborhood. And I can get extra time with my favorite sims by sending them to community lots or on vacation, which freezes the timer at the home lot so that when the sims return no time has passed.
In my very favorite family, the Munnys, the two Munny boys are about midway through their teen lifestage. Sims have panels of wants and fears which are dependent on - well, on a lot of game mechanics I won't go into; it boils down to random chance, contingency, and their personalities. Frank, who BTW is an alien hybrid and green (this is rare but normal within the game), rolls wants having to do with making friends and doing outdoorsy things. But when the phone rings, and it's a teen girl on the other end, the call is for Frank. On my last rotation in this family he didn't have time to go hiking like he wanted to because every time he put the phone down it'd ring again and be another girl. Admittedly, there's a boy shortage at Drama Acres High right now, but none of my other playable boys get half the phone calls, or if he's on a community lot get half the female attention, that Frank does. If his brother Mark (who rolls wants related to music, grades, and girls) picks up, they ask for Frank. If Frank's on a community lot with other teen boys, and someone tries to talk to a girl he's not already in a dating relationship with, she ditches him as soon as possible to line up to talk to Frank. Frank is, obviously, the Coolest Boy in School.
A lot of my attention while playing this household is taken up trying to get poor Mark out of Frank's green shadow, but I am also alert to any indication of who, if anybody, Frank might (in what I believe is still the parlance of the age group) Like. After all, I'll be marrying him off someday, and soap opera relationship drama is one of the prime sources of amusement in the game. So I keep an eye on him when he appears, either as a visitor or in the background at community lots, to see if he gives me any hints. His thought bubbles at a party last rotation contained attraction hearts for a girl named Amanda Ruben, who was running around the party refusing to interact with anyone except her sister and her BFF - which rather tickled me. The guy everyone wants, who only wants the only girl who isn't interested, is a classic, after all.
So what I find myself doing, especially when playing a household containing a teen girl, is something I have never done at all in real life - watching a guy like a hawk and dissecting everything he does for hidden meaning. Of course, it's the nature of the game that the player who, like myself, is chiefly interested in the sims as characters has to interpret the constellation of autonomous behaviors, rolled wants and fears, and stock animations (which are surprisingly varied - some fiendishly talented animators worked on this game) into a fictional individual. But I'm subjecting poor Frank to something much more than that. That process is automatic, pleasant, and almost zenlike. This is tense and obsessive. Oh, shoot, he's giving Tina Traveller a backrub - I don't want him to like her, she's too much younger. Now he's playing the most flirtatious game of redhands I've ever seen with Amanda. Oh, now he's telling Tina a dirty joke, but Amanda's standing right next to her, so is he telling it to Tina and aiming it at Amanda, or what?
I'm always impatient of women who do that sort of thing; because it is such a waste of their time. Most of what they agonize over doesn't mean one dang thing. The guy's not sending messages - he's just hanging out and doing whatever seems like a good idea at the time. If you want something from him, you walk up and ask for it. It's simple.
But I know how they feel when they do that now, even while I laugh at myself about it. After all, it is even more true of Frank than of most guys that his actions aren't motivated by any strong internal drive. If I'm not controlling him, the game mechanics are.
Similarly, I've always had a lot of contempt for the sort of girls for whom boys are status symbols. They aren't competing for the attention of the star football player, or the cute new guy, or whoever because of any quality of his - they're competing because winning that competition gets them a high-status prize that "all" the other girls (girls like me don't count in this equation) want. Yet, when I was playing Amanda Ruben's household, and she picked up the phone, and it was Frank - the first time he's ever been the one calling into a household he isn't part of - I felt her surge of triumph. She barely got to friend status with Frank when they both went on an outing with her BFF - but he called her. She must be pretty hot stuff! (And her cousin was visiting at the time, so she doesn't even have to spread the story herself!)
And I'm willing to let her have that triumph, because heaven knows the poor girl needs something. Her mother has ghastly pregnancies, but keeps wanting more babies, and her father can barely keep ahead of the bills, so Amanda, the oldest girl and the oldest child left at home, never gets to go anywhere when I'm playing her household without a gaggle of kids trailing behind her, never has any money to buy anything much less go out with her friends or date, never has a moment to herself, and is constantly cleaning, or cooking, or changing diapers, or helping with homework, or doing homework, or fixing the sink, or some dang thing - so I think she's entitled to that moment of soaring personal affirmation when the Coolest Guy Called Her. And since she's a little pixel doll and can't actually feel anything, I'm okay to feel it for her.
This experience of emotions and mental states alien to our own is a big draw of fiction in all media, and also of RPGs, which count for these purposes as interactive fiction. It is not sufficient for us to imagine ourselves in the place of someone else; that has its use, but if that's all we ever do it makes everyone else into our reflections, which is not adequate to the purpose. To get all the way out of our own heads, and into somebody else's, is both a good and useful thing and a liberation.
Because I get really tired of being me sometimes. It's a relief to get out of my own head and into that of somebody like Frank - or like Len, the protagonist of the lesbian western - somebody who's alive in the moment and doesn't think everything to death. Or somebody with a completely different set of problems from me. Somebody from another subculture, another gender, another age, another set of base assumptions, another set of personal reactions. So I read, and I write.
But I don't seek out the experience of getting into the head of somebody like Amanda, or like Tina - who is fixated on Frank and onto whom, in the storytelling tool, I've dumped all my dissecting observations of him. I think books like that are boring and I get impatient reading them. The game sneaked their POV's up on me and plunged me into them without warning; and I was not bored or impatient. I was laughing at myself, and them, and having a really good time.
And that's why games. Because whether it's the computer code, or the dice, or the other people sitting at the table with me, I don't control the game beyond the choice to participate or to walk out. If I'm involved in the game, I have to play things as they lie, and I find myself negotiating unfamiliar territory, and enjoying it, before I realize it. I don't have time to self-censor certain areas completely out of my realm of possibility.
Not everybody plays, or reads, like this, of course. Every RPGer knows the type who always plays the same character with a few cosmetic tweaks. Some simmers create neighborhoods in which every sim is a reflection of their personal notion of How the World Should Be, whether that's a whitebread fantasy of a middle class neighborhood inhabited only by perfect white heterosexual nuclear families, or a unisex neighborhood with a same-sex pregnancy hack and all the wrong gender babies put up for adoption. The only wrong way to play is the way that bores you.
And some people only read for one kind of experience, essentially reading the same book over and over again; and that's their privilege; as long as they don't try to restrict their neighbors' reading to the same material. I may think they're deliberately crippling themselves, but if I don't want them telling me what to read I can't tell them what to read, either, and maybe there's sound healthy reasons for their choices. I don't know what their lives are like, after all.
But this is what it's all about for me, and I'm sorry I couldn't explain it more concisely.
This is Frank, BTW. I can sort of see what the girls are on about...
I play my Sims2 neighborhood, Drama Acres, in one day rotations, meaning that I will play one household, containing one to eight little pixel dolls, for one in-game day, and then move on to the next, in a customary order. This is not a particularly long time to spend with one family, but it allows me to play a fine-grained game, with events in one household - say, a death, marriage, date, or quarrel - having repercussions in other households throughout the neighborhood. And I can get extra time with my favorite sims by sending them to community lots or on vacation, which freezes the timer at the home lot so that when the sims return no time has passed.
In my very favorite family, the Munnys, the two Munny boys are about midway through their teen lifestage. Sims have panels of wants and fears which are dependent on - well, on a lot of game mechanics I won't go into; it boils down to random chance, contingency, and their personalities. Frank, who BTW is an alien hybrid and green (this is rare but normal within the game), rolls wants having to do with making friends and doing outdoorsy things. But when the phone rings, and it's a teen girl on the other end, the call is for Frank. On my last rotation in this family he didn't have time to go hiking like he wanted to because every time he put the phone down it'd ring again and be another girl. Admittedly, there's a boy shortage at Drama Acres High right now, but none of my other playable boys get half the phone calls, or if he's on a community lot get half the female attention, that Frank does. If his brother Mark (who rolls wants related to music, grades, and girls) picks up, they ask for Frank. If Frank's on a community lot with other teen boys, and someone tries to talk to a girl he's not already in a dating relationship with, she ditches him as soon as possible to line up to talk to Frank. Frank is, obviously, the Coolest Boy in School.
A lot of my attention while playing this household is taken up trying to get poor Mark out of Frank's green shadow, but I am also alert to any indication of who, if anybody, Frank might (in what I believe is still the parlance of the age group) Like. After all, I'll be marrying him off someday, and soap opera relationship drama is one of the prime sources of amusement in the game. So I keep an eye on him when he appears, either as a visitor or in the background at community lots, to see if he gives me any hints. His thought bubbles at a party last rotation contained attraction hearts for a girl named Amanda Ruben, who was running around the party refusing to interact with anyone except her sister and her BFF - which rather tickled me. The guy everyone wants, who only wants the only girl who isn't interested, is a classic, after all.
So what I find myself doing, especially when playing a household containing a teen girl, is something I have never done at all in real life - watching a guy like a hawk and dissecting everything he does for hidden meaning. Of course, it's the nature of the game that the player who, like myself, is chiefly interested in the sims as characters has to interpret the constellation of autonomous behaviors, rolled wants and fears, and stock animations (which are surprisingly varied - some fiendishly talented animators worked on this game) into a fictional individual. But I'm subjecting poor Frank to something much more than that. That process is automatic, pleasant, and almost zenlike. This is tense and obsessive. Oh, shoot, he's giving Tina Traveller a backrub - I don't want him to like her, she's too much younger. Now he's playing the most flirtatious game of redhands I've ever seen with Amanda. Oh, now he's telling Tina a dirty joke, but Amanda's standing right next to her, so is he telling it to Tina and aiming it at Amanda, or what?
I'm always impatient of women who do that sort of thing; because it is such a waste of their time. Most of what they agonize over doesn't mean one dang thing. The guy's not sending messages - he's just hanging out and doing whatever seems like a good idea at the time. If you want something from him, you walk up and ask for it. It's simple.
But I know how they feel when they do that now, even while I laugh at myself about it. After all, it is even more true of Frank than of most guys that his actions aren't motivated by any strong internal drive. If I'm not controlling him, the game mechanics are.
Similarly, I've always had a lot of contempt for the sort of girls for whom boys are status symbols. They aren't competing for the attention of the star football player, or the cute new guy, or whoever because of any quality of his - they're competing because winning that competition gets them a high-status prize that "all" the other girls (girls like me don't count in this equation) want. Yet, when I was playing Amanda Ruben's household, and she picked up the phone, and it was Frank - the first time he's ever been the one calling into a household he isn't part of - I felt her surge of triumph. She barely got to friend status with Frank when they both went on an outing with her BFF - but he called her. She must be pretty hot stuff! (And her cousin was visiting at the time, so she doesn't even have to spread the story herself!)
And I'm willing to let her have that triumph, because heaven knows the poor girl needs something. Her mother has ghastly pregnancies, but keeps wanting more babies, and her father can barely keep ahead of the bills, so Amanda, the oldest girl and the oldest child left at home, never gets to go anywhere when I'm playing her household without a gaggle of kids trailing behind her, never has any money to buy anything much less go out with her friends or date, never has a moment to herself, and is constantly cleaning, or cooking, or changing diapers, or helping with homework, or doing homework, or fixing the sink, or some dang thing - so I think she's entitled to that moment of soaring personal affirmation when the Coolest Guy Called Her. And since she's a little pixel doll and can't actually feel anything, I'm okay to feel it for her.
This experience of emotions and mental states alien to our own is a big draw of fiction in all media, and also of RPGs, which count for these purposes as interactive fiction. It is not sufficient for us to imagine ourselves in the place of someone else; that has its use, but if that's all we ever do it makes everyone else into our reflections, which is not adequate to the purpose. To get all the way out of our own heads, and into somebody else's, is both a good and useful thing and a liberation.
Because I get really tired of being me sometimes. It's a relief to get out of my own head and into that of somebody like Frank - or like Len, the protagonist of the lesbian western - somebody who's alive in the moment and doesn't think everything to death. Or somebody with a completely different set of problems from me. Somebody from another subculture, another gender, another age, another set of base assumptions, another set of personal reactions. So I read, and I write.
But I don't seek out the experience of getting into the head of somebody like Amanda, or like Tina - who is fixated on Frank and onto whom, in the storytelling tool, I've dumped all my dissecting observations of him. I think books like that are boring and I get impatient reading them. The game sneaked their POV's up on me and plunged me into them without warning; and I was not bored or impatient. I was laughing at myself, and them, and having a really good time.
And that's why games. Because whether it's the computer code, or the dice, or the other people sitting at the table with me, I don't control the game beyond the choice to participate or to walk out. If I'm involved in the game, I have to play things as they lie, and I find myself negotiating unfamiliar territory, and enjoying it, before I realize it. I don't have time to self-censor certain areas completely out of my realm of possibility.
Not everybody plays, or reads, like this, of course. Every RPGer knows the type who always plays the same character with a few cosmetic tweaks. Some simmers create neighborhoods in which every sim is a reflection of their personal notion of How the World Should Be, whether that's a whitebread fantasy of a middle class neighborhood inhabited only by perfect white heterosexual nuclear families, or a unisex neighborhood with a same-sex pregnancy hack and all the wrong gender babies put up for adoption. The only wrong way to play is the way that bores you.
And some people only read for one kind of experience, essentially reading the same book over and over again; and that's their privilege; as long as they don't try to restrict their neighbors' reading to the same material. I may think they're deliberately crippling themselves, but if I don't want them telling me what to read I can't tell them what to read, either, and maybe there's sound healthy reasons for their choices. I don't know what their lives are like, after all.
But this is what it's all about for me, and I'm sorry I couldn't explain it more concisely.
This is Frank, BTW. I can sort of see what the girls are on about...
Sunday, June 3, 2012
Idea Garage Sale: Translating Captivity
Non-fiction remains a never-drying well of story. I've been reading Slavery in Indian Country: The Changing Face of Captivity in Early America, by Christina Snyder, and thinking that we're overdue for a revival of the captivity narrative in YA literature. It used to be a staple, but nowadays - when the illumination an honest and evenhanded fiction could cast on a host of modern realities should be particularly relevant - they've vanished.
And it's true that a lot of the true captivity stories an author can research among are cut off in their prime, as a lot of high-profile cases died young. But consider this early example:
Thirteen-year-old Hernando de Escalente Fontaneda...was on his way to be educated in Spain when his ship sank off the coast of Florida around 1550. The Calusa chief, called "Carlos" by the Spaniards, dispatched forty-two of the ship's crew, killing some immediately and reserving the deaths of others for special ceremonial occasions. He spared Fontaneda, perhaps because of the captive's youth. Fontaneda learned the Calusa language as well as three other Native Floridian tongues. The young linguist became very useful to Chief Carlos, who had grown frustrated with Spanish captives who could not understand his commands. He retained Fontaneda as a translator, and the Spaniard remained among the Calusas until he was ransomed at the age of 30.
As dust jacket copy, that needs spicing up, but as a summary of a YA plot it covers the bases. Except the romantic one, but that's easily dealt with after a little research. Chief Carlos can easily become an ambiguous villain/mentor/father figure. Fontaneda is placed in a hellishly ambivalent position regarding his (older) fellow captives, and grows up in a liminal space - more privileged and powerful than his fellow slaves due to his ability to communicate between them and his masters, but powerless to do anyone but himself much good.
An author uncomfortable with dealing with the sore points of history underlying modern racial conflicts, or anxious to conform to current literary fashion, could easily translate this plot into science fiction (with Chief Carlos as leader of indigenous aliens on a planet earth is trying to colonize) or fantasy (with Carlos as elf-, dwarf-, or goblin-king); but honestly I think current literary fashions are too wussy on this topic. Nobody's not going to recognize the Indian/European metaphor, and using aliens or fantasy races as stand-ins for The Human Other is not only an over-used tactic, it's one that obscures the core problem more than it enables healing of it. All human cultures are both intrinsically valid and capable of routinely doing morally indefensible things and defending them with moral and practical arguments. It's time we dealt with that instead of pussyfooting around it all the time.
P.S. The arm is much better. I can still feel it, but I slept without pain pills last night and dressed myself this morning!
And it's true that a lot of the true captivity stories an author can research among are cut off in their prime, as a lot of high-profile cases died young. But consider this early example:
Thirteen-year-old Hernando de Escalente Fontaneda...was on his way to be educated in Spain when his ship sank off the coast of Florida around 1550. The Calusa chief, called "Carlos" by the Spaniards, dispatched forty-two of the ship's crew, killing some immediately and reserving the deaths of others for special ceremonial occasions. He spared Fontaneda, perhaps because of the captive's youth. Fontaneda learned the Calusa language as well as three other Native Floridian tongues. The young linguist became very useful to Chief Carlos, who had grown frustrated with Spanish captives who could not understand his commands. He retained Fontaneda as a translator, and the Spaniard remained among the Calusas until he was ransomed at the age of 30.
As dust jacket copy, that needs spicing up, but as a summary of a YA plot it covers the bases. Except the romantic one, but that's easily dealt with after a little research. Chief Carlos can easily become an ambiguous villain/mentor/father figure. Fontaneda is placed in a hellishly ambivalent position regarding his (older) fellow captives, and grows up in a liminal space - more privileged and powerful than his fellow slaves due to his ability to communicate between them and his masters, but powerless to do anyone but himself much good.
An author uncomfortable with dealing with the sore points of history underlying modern racial conflicts, or anxious to conform to current literary fashion, could easily translate this plot into science fiction (with Chief Carlos as leader of indigenous aliens on a planet earth is trying to colonize) or fantasy (with Carlos as elf-, dwarf-, or goblin-king); but honestly I think current literary fashions are too wussy on this topic. Nobody's not going to recognize the Indian/European metaphor, and using aliens or fantasy races as stand-ins for The Human Other is not only an over-used tactic, it's one that obscures the core problem more than it enables healing of it. All human cultures are both intrinsically valid and capable of routinely doing morally indefensible things and defending them with moral and practical arguments. It's time we dealt with that instead of pussyfooting around it all the time.
P.S. The arm is much better. I can still feel it, but I slept without pain pills last night and dressed myself this morning!
Tuesday, June 29, 2010
All Generalizations are False
One morning while driving to Castroville I passed a truck on the side of the road. Three or four miles later I passed a middle-aged white man in a gimme cap and jeans, carrying something in one hand and his other hand extended with his thumb out. I damn near pulled over, but during the crucial moment I thought: "If I were his daughter, wife, mother, sister, and I stopped to pick up a hitcher while I was alone, he'd kick my butt."
I didn't feel good about it, but out of respect for his presumed feelings on the matter I went on by and he kept trudging. I hope one of the construction crews I passed that morning stopped for him. Assuming, as I do, that the truck was his, he'd already walked a lot farther than he should have had to - a lot farther than I would have had to. I know this because I've been stranded before. In Texas, anyway, and among Texans, middle-aged white women practically have rescue-on-demand as a class feature (to put it in gaming terms).
I like to think that, for almost any other conglomeration of features, I would have stopped. It seems only fair, since people will stop for me; and certain types of people are statistically far less likely to be rescued. A Mexican woman with kids in tow on Highway 90 will probably be picked up by the first Mexican driver to come along; but a black person of any age or gender is almost certainly going to be stuck, and I hope I'd have the decency to recognize this in time. But people seldom hitch these days: because cultural paranoia both stops people like me from picking them up, for fear that they might be rapists and serial killers, and leads potential hitchers to expect a high risk that anyone who did pick them up was a serial killer or rapist. Since I seldom have the opportunity to pick up a hitcher, my database for predicting my own behavior is inadequate. I don't know what I'd do in any given situation until I do it. Nobody does.
So how does this gel with my confident assumption that a man I'd never met, of whom I caught a glimpse breezing by at 70 MPH, would disapprove of my stopping to rescue him? If I don't know what I'd do, how can I be so sure how he'd feel? Isn't it wrong to operate on stereotypes like that?
Well - sure. But I defy you to learn anything without generalizing from past experience, or to have repeated experiences and not generalize from them. We sort things into categories for handy reference so we can make quick judgements when we need to. That rattling noise you hear may not be a rattlesnake, but if it is, freezing in position while you get more facts could save your life. If in your experience gimme caps, trucks, and middle-aged white faces are packaged with a certain set of attitudes and behaviors, adapting your own behavior to take those into account is reasonable and will save you the trouble of reanalyzing your deameanor towards every new middle-aged white face you see. For that matter, you're using generalizations even to recognize sex, age, color, vehicle, and headgear as important features in an encounter. And you can't talk about good, evil, war, peace, health, illness, literature, or the weather without generalizing. The capacity to do so is a basic component of the mechanics of human intelligence.
I've talked about this a little before when I talked about how genre is a fantasy. It's bad to mistake the map for the territory; but if you don't have the map, you can't negotiate the territory. I love the paradox I used for the post title, because like any good paradox it's true. It works. Any social acumen I possess, any capacity I have to work out a rational course of action, any ability I have to create believable three-dimensional characters, depends on my keeping that principle in mind.
At worst, stereotypes aren't based on real experience, but are projections of one's fears, faults, and worst impulses. I could trot out any number of examples, but that would make people angry (and by people I mean me). But stereotypes can also be subverted and turned to positive uses, making the people to whom they apply more familiar and less frightening. The tendency of minorities to embrace negative steretypes of themselves for humorous purposes is brilliant tactics, a kind of cultural judo, though it can be embarrassing or disempowering at certain stages of the acculturation process. And for a writer, starting with a stereotype and finding the human being inside is a good characterization trick to have in the bag.
But a generalization is not a universally applicable truth. In order to be useful, you have to be able to come down to specifics. It's counterproductive to keep looking for rattlesnakes in New York City every time you hear a rattle. I'm entitled to initiate contact, or not, with a person based on how the last 100 middle-aged white men in gimme caps treated me, but once we're in contact, if this one treats me differently, I need to react to him, not to the last 100.
The only person we ever kicked out of our gaming group had one image of me, and another of my husband. Holding a fruitful conversation with him became impossible when I was always responded to as some shining persecuted angel of patience, regardless of what I said, and Damon was always responded to as an arrogant amoral cad, regardless of what he did, in game or out. That was an extreme case; but people do this to each other all the time. I don't think I've ever seen a flamewar that didn't start with one person doing this to another.
We can't, alas, stop other people from doing this to us. But we can, and should, and must, strive to keep ourselves from doing it to them. Whether "they" are real people, or historical figures, or characters.
I think I should have stopped for him.
(And now for something completely different: Origami that folds itself! How cool is that?)
I didn't feel good about it, but out of respect for his presumed feelings on the matter I went on by and he kept trudging. I hope one of the construction crews I passed that morning stopped for him. Assuming, as I do, that the truck was his, he'd already walked a lot farther than he should have had to - a lot farther than I would have had to. I know this because I've been stranded before. In Texas, anyway, and among Texans, middle-aged white women practically have rescue-on-demand as a class feature (to put it in gaming terms).
I like to think that, for almost any other conglomeration of features, I would have stopped. It seems only fair, since people will stop for me; and certain types of people are statistically far less likely to be rescued. A Mexican woman with kids in tow on Highway 90 will probably be picked up by the first Mexican driver to come along; but a black person of any age or gender is almost certainly going to be stuck, and I hope I'd have the decency to recognize this in time. But people seldom hitch these days: because cultural paranoia both stops people like me from picking them up, for fear that they might be rapists and serial killers, and leads potential hitchers to expect a high risk that anyone who did pick them up was a serial killer or rapist. Since I seldom have the opportunity to pick up a hitcher, my database for predicting my own behavior is inadequate. I don't know what I'd do in any given situation until I do it. Nobody does.
So how does this gel with my confident assumption that a man I'd never met, of whom I caught a glimpse breezing by at 70 MPH, would disapprove of my stopping to rescue him? If I don't know what I'd do, how can I be so sure how he'd feel? Isn't it wrong to operate on stereotypes like that?
Well - sure. But I defy you to learn anything without generalizing from past experience, or to have repeated experiences and not generalize from them. We sort things into categories for handy reference so we can make quick judgements when we need to. That rattling noise you hear may not be a rattlesnake, but if it is, freezing in position while you get more facts could save your life. If in your experience gimme caps, trucks, and middle-aged white faces are packaged with a certain set of attitudes and behaviors, adapting your own behavior to take those into account is reasonable and will save you the trouble of reanalyzing your deameanor towards every new middle-aged white face you see. For that matter, you're using generalizations even to recognize sex, age, color, vehicle, and headgear as important features in an encounter. And you can't talk about good, evil, war, peace, health, illness, literature, or the weather without generalizing. The capacity to do so is a basic component of the mechanics of human intelligence.
I've talked about this a little before when I talked about how genre is a fantasy. It's bad to mistake the map for the territory; but if you don't have the map, you can't negotiate the territory. I love the paradox I used for the post title, because like any good paradox it's true. It works. Any social acumen I possess, any capacity I have to work out a rational course of action, any ability I have to create believable three-dimensional characters, depends on my keeping that principle in mind.
At worst, stereotypes aren't based on real experience, but are projections of one's fears, faults, and worst impulses. I could trot out any number of examples, but that would make people angry (and by people I mean me). But stereotypes can also be subverted and turned to positive uses, making the people to whom they apply more familiar and less frightening. The tendency of minorities to embrace negative steretypes of themselves for humorous purposes is brilliant tactics, a kind of cultural judo, though it can be embarrassing or disempowering at certain stages of the acculturation process. And for a writer, starting with a stereotype and finding the human being inside is a good characterization trick to have in the bag.
But a generalization is not a universally applicable truth. In order to be useful, you have to be able to come down to specifics. It's counterproductive to keep looking for rattlesnakes in New York City every time you hear a rattle. I'm entitled to initiate contact, or not, with a person based on how the last 100 middle-aged white men in gimme caps treated me, but once we're in contact, if this one treats me differently, I need to react to him, not to the last 100.
The only person we ever kicked out of our gaming group had one image of me, and another of my husband. Holding a fruitful conversation with him became impossible when I was always responded to as some shining persecuted angel of patience, regardless of what I said, and Damon was always responded to as an arrogant amoral cad, regardless of what he did, in game or out. That was an extreme case; but people do this to each other all the time. I don't think I've ever seen a flamewar that didn't start with one person doing this to another.
We can't, alas, stop other people from doing this to us. But we can, and should, and must, strive to keep ourselves from doing it to them. Whether "they" are real people, or historical figures, or characters.
I think I should have stopped for him.
(And now for something completely different: Origami that folds itself! How cool is that?)
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